Author: Cognore

A new strain of ransomware , dubbed Bad Rabbit has affected over 200 major organizations mainly in Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Japan, and Turkey.

It is reportedly a new Petya-like targeted ransomware attack against corporate networks, demanding 0.05 bitcoin (~ $285) as ransom from victims to unlock their systems.

One of the distribution method of Bad Rabbit is via drive-by download. Some popular websites are compromised and have JavaScript injected in their HTML body or in one of their .js file.

This script reports the following to 185.149.120[.]3, which doesn’t seem to respond at the moment.

Browser User-Agent

Referrer

Cookie from the visited site

Domain name of the visited site

Server side logic can determine if the visitor is of interest and then add content to the page. In that case, what we have seen is that a popup asking to download an update for Flash Player is shown in the middle of the page.

When clicking on the “Install” button, download of an executable file from 1dnscontrol[.]com is initiated. This executable file, install_flash_player.exe is the dropper for Win32/Filecoder.D.

The downloaded file named install_flash_player.exe needs to be manually launched by the victim. To operate correctly, it needs elevated administrative privileges which it attempts to obtain using the standard UAC prompt. If started, it will save the malicious DLL as C:\Windows\infpub.dat and launch it using rundll32.

Finally the computer is locked and show the ransom note

infpub.dat acts as a typical file encrypting ransomware: it finds the victim’s data files using an embedded extension list and encrypts them using the criminal’s public RSA-2048 key.

The executable dispci.exe appears to be derived from the code base of the legitimate utility DiskCryptor. It acts as the disk encryption module which also installs the modified bootloader and prevents the normal boot-up process of the infected machine.

Win32/Diskcoder.D has the ability to spread via SMB. As opposed to some public claims, it does notuse the EthernalBlue vulnerability like the Win32/Diskcoder.C (Not-Petya) outbreak. First, it scans internal network for open SMB shares.

Mimikatz is launched on the compromised computer to harvest credentials. A hardcoded list username and password is also present.

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HOW TO PREVENT YOURSELF?

Kaspersky suggest to disable WMI service to prevent the malware from spreading over your network.

Creating a file with the paths c:\windows\infpub.dat and removing any write permission from it.

Nearly a year after the disclosure of the Dirty COW vulnerability that affected the Linux kernel, cybercriminals have started exploiting the vulnerability against Android users.

Publicly disclosed last year in October, Dirty COW was present in a section of the Linux kernel—a part of virtually every Linux distribution, including Red Hat, Debian, and Ubuntu—for years and was actively exploited in the wild.

Security researchers from Trend Micro published a blog post on Monday disclosing that the privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2016-5195), known as Dirty COW, has now been actively exploited by a malware sample of ZNIU, detected as AndroidOS_ZNIU.

The ZNIU malware was detected in more than 40 countries last month, with the majority of the victims found in China and India. The malware was also detected in the U.S., Japan, Canada, Germany, and Indonesia. As of this writing, more than 5,000 affected users have been detected.

The malware uses the Dirty COW exploit to root Android devices via the copy-on-write (COW) mechanism in Android’s Linux kernel and install a backdoor which can then be used by attackers to collect data and generate profit through a premium rate phone number.

ZNIU’s leveraging of Dirty COW only works on Android devices with ARM/X86 64-bit architecture. However, this recent exploit can bypass SELinux and plant a root backdoor, while the PoC can only modify the service code of the system.

INFECTION CHAIN

The ZNIU malware often appears as a porn app downloaded from malicious websites, where users are tricked into clicking on a malicious URL that installs the malware-carrying app on their device. Once launched, ZNIU will communicate with its C&C server. If an update to its code is available, it retrieves it from the C&C server and loads it into the system. Simultaneously, the Dirty COW exploit will be used to provide local privilege escalation to overcome system restrictions and plant a backdoor for potential remote control attacks in the future.

After entering the main UI of the device, the malware will harvest the carrier information of the user. It then transacts with the carrier through an SMS-enabled payment service, allowing the malware operator to pose as the device owner. Through the victim’s mobile device, the operator behind ZNIU will collect money through the carrier’s payment service. In one of the samples, in its code the payments were directed to a dummy company, which, based on network traffic, was located in a city in China. When the SMS transaction is over, the malware will delete the messages from the device, leaving no sign of the transaction between the carrier and the malware operator. If the carrier is outside China, there will be no possible SMS transaction with the carrier, but the malware will still exploit the system to plant a backdoor.

The main logic of ZNIU’s native code works as follows:

1. Collect the model information of the device.

2. Fetch appropriate rootkits from the remote server.

3. Decrypt the exploits.

4. Trigger exploits one by one, check the result, and remove exploit files.

5. Report if the exploit succeeded or failed.

The researchers found the malware has already infected more than 5,000 Android users across 40 countries in recent weeks, with the majority of victims found in China and India, while other resides in the United States, Japan, Canada, Germany and Indonesia.

Google has released an update for Android that, among other fixes, officially fixes the Dirty COW vulnerability. The tech giant also confirmed that its Play Protect now protects Android users against this malware.

The easiest way to prevent yourself from being targeted by such clever malware is to avoid downloading apps from third-party sources and always stick to the official Google Play Store.

As part of its September Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released a large batch of security updates to patch a total of 81 CVE-listed vulnerabilities, on all supported versions of Windows and other MS products.

The latest security update addresses 27 critical and 54 important vulnerabilities in severity, of which 38 vulnerabilities are impacting Windows, 39 could lead to Remote Code Execution (RCE).

This vulnerability resides in the way Microsoft .NET Framework processes untrusted input data.

Microsoft says the flaw could allow an attacker to take control of an affected system, install programs, view, change, or delete data by tricking victims into opening a specially crafted document or application sent over an email.

This zero-day flaw has actively been exploited by a well-funded cyber espionage group to deliver FinFisher Spyware (FinSpy) to a Russian-speaking “entity” via malicious Microsoft Office RTF files in July this year.

FinSpy is a highly secret surveillance software that has previously been associated with British company Gamma Group, a company that legally sells surveillance and espionage software to government agencies.

Once infected, FinSpy can perform a large number of secret tasks on victims computer, including secretly monitoring computers by turning ON webcams, recording everything the user types with a keylogger, intercepting Skype calls, copying files, and much more.

“The [new variant of FINSPY]…leverages heavily obfuscated code that employs a built-in virtual machine – among other anti-analysis techniques – to make reversing more difficult,” researchers at FireEye said.

“As likely another unique anti-analysis technique, it parses its own full path and searches for the string representation of its own MD5 hash. Many resources, such as analysis tools and sandboxes, rename files/samples to their MD5 hash in order to ensure unique filenames.”

There are 3 more publicly disclosed vulnerabilities affecting Windows 10:

Broadcom BCM43xx Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2017-9417): this flaw exists in the Broadcom chipset in HoloLens, which could be exploited by attackers to send a specially crafted WiFi packet, enabling them to install programs, view, change, or delete data, even create new accounts with full admin rights.

There are more vulnerabilities that are patched like BlueBorne. So the best thing to protect is to update as soon as possible.

Billions of mobile, desktop and IoT devices that use Bluetooth may be exposed to a new remote attack, even without any user interaction and pairing. The unique condition for BlueBorne attacks is that targeted devices must have Bluetooth enabled.

The new attack technique, dubbed BlueBorne, was devised by experts with Armis Labs. Researchers have discovered a total of eight vulnerabilities in the Bluetooth design that expose devices to cyber attacks.

Security researchers have just discovered total 8 zero-day vulnerabilities in Bluetooth protocol that impact more than 5.3 Billion devices—from Android, iOS, Windows and Linux to the Internet of things (IoT) devices—using the short-range wireless communication technology.

Using these vulnerabilities, security researchers at IoT security firm Armis have devised an attack, dubbed BlueBorne, which could allow attackers to completely take over Bluetooth-enabled devices, spread malware, or even establish a “man-in-the-middle” connection to gain access to devices’ critical data and networks without requiring any victim interaction.

BlueBorne: Wormable Bluetooth Attack

The BlueBorne attack could spread like the wormable WannaCry ransomware that emerged earlier this year and wrecked havoc by disrupting large companies and organisations worldwide.

Ben Seri, head of research team at Armis Labs, claims that during an experiment in the lab, his team was able to create a botnet network and install ransomware using the BlueBorne attack.

The researchers have discovered information disclosure and code execution flaws in Linux, four code execution, MitM and information disclosure vulnerabilities in Android (CVE-2017-0781, CVE-2017-0782, CVE-2017-0783 and CVE-2017-0785), one vulnerability that allows MitM attacks in Windows (CVE-2017-8628) and one code execution flaw in the Bluetooth Low Energy Audio protocol used by iOS.

Armis demonstrated that it is also possible for an attacker to exploit one BlueBorne vulnerability to launch MitM attacks against Windows machines and hijack the victim’s browsing session to a phishing website.

In the following video, a hacker can exploit the BlueBorne flaw to take over a Samsung smartwatch running the Tizen OS.

The security firm responsibly disclosed the vulnerabilities to all the major affected companies a few months ago—including Google, Apple and Microsoft, Samsung and Linux Foundation.

An attacker could exploit the vulnerabilities to intercept traffic, upload malicious firmware, and get full control over the affected routers.

Kim in a blog post wrote that “the D-Link DIR 850L is a router overall badly designed with a lot of vulnerabilities. Basically, everything was pwned, from the LAN to the WAN. Even the custom MyDlink cloud protocol was abused.”

This isn’t the first time Kim spots flaws in D-Link products, in October 2016 he reported multiple vulnerabilities in D-Link DWR-932B LTE router, but the Taiwan-based firm ignored them.

For this reason, the experts this time decided to publicly disclose the zero-day vulnerabilities hoping that the company will fix them.

Below the list of zero-day vulnerabilities disclosed by Kim that affect D-Link DIR 850L revision A and revision B:

Lack of proper firmware protection—the firmware images are not protected, an attacker could upload a malicious firmware version to the device and compromise it. While firmware for D-Link 850L RevA has no protection, the firmware for D-Link 850L RevB is protected with a hardcoded password.

Cross-site scripting (XSS) Flaws—both LAN and WAN of D-Link 850L RevA is vulnerable to “several trivial” XSS vulnerability, allowing an attacker “to use the XSS to target an authenticated user in order to steal the authentication cookies.”

Retrieve admin passwords—both LAN and WAN of D-Link 850L RevB are vulnerable, an attacker can retrieve the admin password and use the MyDLink cloud protocol to add the user’s router to the attacker’s account to gain full access to the device.

Weak cloud protocol— both D-Link 850L RevA and RevB. are vulnerable. MyDLink protocol works via a TCP tunnel that use no encryption at all to protect communications between the victim’s router and the MyDLink account.

Backdoor Access—D-Link 850L RevB routers have backdoor access via Alphanetworks, an attacker can get a root shell on the device.

Private keys hardcoded in the firmware—the private encryption keys are hardcoded in the firmware of both D-Link 850L RevA and RevB. An attacker could extract them to perform man-in-the-middle attacks.

No authentication check—An attacker could alter the DNS settings of a D-Link 850L RevA router via non-authenticated HTTP requests and hijack the traffic.

Weak files permission and credentials stored in cleartext—local files are exposed in both D-Link 850L RevA and RevB. Credentials are stored in clear text.

The banking malware EMOTET which was first detected in 2014 is back.Researchers at trend micro have discovered a spam campaign targeting all sectors and industries unlike it’s previous variant.

The United States, United Kingdom, and Canada made up the bulk of the target regions, with the US taking up 58% of all our detected infections, while Great Britain and Canada were at 12% and 8% respectively.

These new variants use multiple ways to spread. Its primary propagation method involves the use of a spam botnet, which results in its rapid distribution via email. EMOTET can also spread via a network propagation module that brute forces its way into an account domain using a dictionary attack. EMOTET’s use of compromised URLs as C&C servers likely helped it spread as well.

For a malware with email-spamming and lateral-movement capabilities, infecting business systems and acquiring corporate e-mails translates to larger and more effective spam targeting and a higher chance of gaining information.

The new EMOTET variants initially arrive as spam claiming to be an invoice or payment notification to trick its victims into believing that this is a legitimate email from a supplier.

In the body of this email is a malicious URL that will download a document containing a malicious macro when a user clicks on it. This macro will then execute a PowerShell command line that is responsible for downloading EMOTET.

Once downloaded, EMOTET drops and executes copies of itself into the following folders:

If EMOTET has no admin privileges, it will drop the copies into %AppDataLocal%\Microsoft\Windows\{string 1}{string 2}.exe

If EMOTET contains admin privileges, it will instead drop the copies into System%\{string 1}{string 2}.exe

The malware will attempt to ease its entry into the system by deleting the Zone Identifier Alternate Data Stream (ADS), which is a string of information that describes the Internet Explorer Trust Settings of the file’s download source. This is one way for the system to find out if a downloaded file is from a high-risk source, blocking the download if it is detected as such.

EMOTET will then register itself as a system service and adds registry entries to ensure that it is automatically executed at every system startup. The typical windows service acts as a “controller” for most hardware-based applications, while others are used to control other applications. The EMOTET malware, on the other hand, uses it for both Elevation of Privilege, and as an autostart mechanism.

EMOTET will list the system’s currently running processes and then proceed to gather information on both the system itself and the operating system used.

It will then connect to the Command & Control (C&C) servers to update to its latest version, as well as to determine the type of payload that it will deliver. One of the possible payloads is the persistent banking trojan known as DRIDEX, which attempts to harvest banking account information via browser monitoring routines. Furthermore, the malware can also turn the infected system into part of a botnet that sends spam emails intended to spread the malware even further. This allows the trojan to spread quickly, as the more systems it can potentially infect, the faster it will propagate. The malware is also capable of harvesting email information and stealing username and password information found in installed browsers

We discovered that in addition to the above payloads, the C&C server is responsible for sending modules that will perform the following routines, which includes:

SPAMMING Module

Network Worm Module

Mail Password Viewer

Web Browser Password Viewer

PREVENTION & MITIGATION

Preventing this malware to infect your machine requires the usual security measures like do not download attachments from unknown email attachments and sources alongwith not clicking on links that are not trusted and always use a good AV solution.

Researchers at Lookout have identified a mobile trojan called xRAT with extensive data collection functionality and the ability to remotely run a suicide function to avoid detection. The malware is associated with the high-profile Xsser / mRAT malware, which made headlines after targeting both iOS and Android devices of pro-democracy Hong Kong activists in late 2014.

xRAT has many similarities with mRAT, it has the same structure and uses the same decryption key. The analysis of the code revealed that both malware uses the same naming conventions that suggest both malicious codes were developed by the same threat actor.

According to researchers from security firm Lookout, the command and control (C&C) servers used for the xRAT malware is the same of a Windows malware, a circumstance that suggests the threat actor is composed of experienced experts.

xRAT supports an impressive set of capabilities that include flexible reconnaissance and information gathering, detection evasion, specific checks for antivirus, app and file deletion functionality.It also searches for data belonging to popular communications apps like QQ and WeChat.

Listed below are the types of data gathered by xRAT and features that enable it to perform reconnaissance, run remote code, and exfiltrate data from Android devices:

Automatically retrieve files that are of an attacker specified type that are between a minimum and maximum size

Search external storage for a file with a specific MD5 hash and, if identified, retrieve it

Upload attacker specified files to C2 infrastructure

Make a call out to an attacker specified number

Record audio and write it directly to an already established command and control network socket

Executes attacker specified command as the root user

Downloads a 22MB trojanized version of QQ from hiapk[.]com, saving it to /sdcard/.wx/wx.apk. Referred to as ‘rapid flow mode’.

To avoid detection, the xRAT implements a “suicide” function that could be triggered to clean the installation on the infected mobile device.

The developers behind xRAT created an alert system, flagging to the malware operator if any of the following antivirus applications are present on a compromised device.

管家 (housekeeper)

安全 (safety)

权限 (Authority)

卫士 (Guardian)

清理 (Cleanup)

杀毒 (Antivirus)

Defender

Security

xRAT can be remotely instructed to perform a wide range of deletion operations, such as removing large portions of a device or attacker-specified files like images from certain directories on the SDCard, all apps and data from /data/data/, and all system apps from /system/app/.

Most of the C&C infrastructure used by xRAT in the past were based in China, but sample recently analyzed by the company were located in the United States.

As anticipated, the C&C infrastructure also controlled a Windows malware, the experts also noticed a malicious executable named MyExam, this means that “the actors behind this family may be continuing to target students, similar to how attackers used mRAT during the protests in 2014.”